Not sure what the folks at Epic are smoking, but Android devices without Google Play are failures, and it's how Google forced their other apps on device makers

Not sure what the folks at Epic are smoking, but Android devices without Google Play are failures, and it's how Google forced their other apps on device makers as well. Google may have paid $8B to Samsung, but I wonder what the effects were, as I own multiple Samsung devices, and the Google apps are not defaults. Except for Google Play, I don't remember any others. Was it something like "here's $8B so you don't feel bad about us coercing you?"